New Platform Answers the Question: Who’s Really Behind That ICO?

With crypto scams running rampant across the globe, Human Trust Protocol, aka Hub, is joining hands with Civic, a blockchain identification service provider, to verify users via know-your-client (KYC) data gathered from the Civic secure identity platform (SIP). The new project entitled ICO Hub is an algorithmic ICO rating service that adds identity verification as a central rating factor: Hub representatives will now be able to identify ICO project team members and organizers to ensure a platform’s authenticity before investors step in.

Launched by LinkedIn’s original CTO and co-founder Eric Ly, Hub works to establish blockchain histories and reputations by granting users blockchain-specific tokens which they can then add to a platform’s reputation data, thereby building its online market presence.

Civic seeks to grant consumers a say in whether their identities are used in real-time by providing low-cost, on-demand and secure identity verification technology that boosts transparency and legitimacy in the crypto space. Civic uses a decentralized structure with biometrics on mobile devices, and provides multi-factor authentication without usernames, passwords, physical tokens or third-party involvement.

ICO Hub is built on a specific rating system. ICOs will ultimately receive “trust scores” based on the authenticity of their organizers’ claims and users’ outcome predictions.

In a statement, founder and CEO Eric Ly explained, “At Hub, our objective is to help users develop and manage their reputation data and incentivize meaningful and authentic interactions online through our human trust protocol. Civic’s secure and private ecosystem that enables decentralized, reusable KYC is a perfect fit, and gives our protocol users another means to bolster their reputation histories.”

CTO and co-founder of Civic Jonathan Smith told Bitcoin Magazine that the Wall Street Journal recently analyzed over 1,400 digital coin offerings, and found that roughly 20 percent of them engage in some sort of fraud, from plagiarized investor documents to fake executive teams.

“Within the coin offerings analyzed by the Journal, nearly $1 billion was poured into fraudulent investments, and so far, investors have claimed losses of up to $273 million,” he states.

Both Civic and Hub believe their collaboration on ICO Hub will contribute to lasting trust in the blockchain space, boost users’ credentials on neighboring platforms, and improve transaction efficiency.

“ICO Hub is the first algorithmic ICO rating system that, unlike qualitative analysis-based rating systems, will help companies more towards self-regulation,” Smith said. “In a time where crypto projects are under constant scrutiny, it will help users stake tokens and predict the outcomes of ICO projects, instead of relying on social and github signals. Having a strong ID verification service integrated in the algorithmic evaluation will enable Hub to significantly reduce the risks related to impersonation and fake personas that have plagued ICOs and allowed fraudsters to run off with money undetected.”

Regulators have consistently worked to crackdown on fraudulent ICO projects. Last February, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a string of subpoenas to several ICO organizers, believing they were in violation of recent securities laws, and speaking with CNBC last November, Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin commented that most ICOs are fake, and have no intention of offering anything valid to their investors.